Dan Misener scraped the Kickstarter website, only to find out that there are in fact no readily visible failed projects. Misener brings up the interesting point that it is hard for new project creators to learn from the failure of others if they can’t see those failures. I understand why Kickstarter hides failures, I would too, but a bigger point that Misener didn’t touch on is the projects that were funded that still failed.

This is not uncommon, but it’s rarely (if ever) talked about. It’s going to take a major failure for a change to be made. Imagine if the runaway success project for the Pebble watch fails to ever see the light of day. Kickstarter can rebound from that, but they need to have much better communication than they currently have with backers. Right now all I ever hear from Kickstarter is what new projects they think I should back.

What about the projects that are massively behind schedule? What responsibility should Kickstarter have to backers over those failures?

Both questions are going to need to be answered, clearly, sooner rather than later.